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Opposition Leader Ches Crosbie said the interim reports on rate mitigation by Liberty and Synapse for the Public Utilities Board (PUB) prove the Ball government should have acted long before now to engage the federal government on finding solutions.

Thursday, January 3, 2019

St. John’s, NL (January 3, 2019) – Opposition Leader Ches Crosbie said the interim reports on rate mitigation by Liberty and Synapse for the Public Utilities Board (PUB) prove the Ball government should have acted long before now to engage the federal government on finding solutions.

Liberty identified substantive options that “require policy decisions - - some of them engaging the federal government” (page 34), require “negotiation with the federal government” (pages 5-6), and are “subject to agreement with the federal government” (page 12).

Crosbie said the Ball Liberals have had more than three years to develop a rate mitigation plan but didn’t take his advice to engage the PUB on developing options until late last year, meaning the final reports and recommendations are not expected until 2020, months after the next election is scheduled.

In September, federal Cabinet Minister Seamus O’Regan said talks between the province and Ottawa on rate mitigation were not even happening.

“If the federal minister was right that talks on options to lower electricity rates were not happening, that is absolutely shocking – but if those talks were indeed happening and Mr. O’Regan was simply out of the loop or providing cover, people need to be told now what options are being considered,” said Crosbie. “This is too serious an issue for Premier Ball and Minister O’Regan to be clowning around.”

Crosbie said clearly Ottawa needs to be part of the solution to affordable power rates. “If Premier Ball had effectively engaged the Trudeau Liberals in 2015 instead of wasting his entire term in office achieving nothing, the rate mitigation problem could have been solved long before now,” said Crosbie.